Loving the brown and black belt kata classes

When I was a brown belt (less than a year ago), I enjoyed Wednesday kata night at karate, but didn't enjoy it as much as I do now that I'm a black belt. Why? Simply because at brown belt level, the katas that we practiced in class were largely not usable in competition due to restrictions for kyu ranks (non-black belts), and thus my focus was highly on what I'm allowed to do for competition and what my black belt test will take me through.

Now that I'm a black belt and restrictions in competition largely don't exist for me (or at least are different restrictions), practicing those black belt kata like Jutte, Bassai Sho and Hangetsu actually MEANS something. I CARE whether I come back to my starting mark at the finish, I CARE whether I'm doing the right stances when it comes to stances that look similar to front stance but are different tension-wise. And I'm very much looking forward to the upcoming competitive season. For kata, anyway. Kumite is going to be quite another story, although I look forward to my learning improvements there too.

Last night the lowest ranked student was brown belt so we practiced Jutte and Hangetsu. Last Wednesday we had a purple belt in our ranks so we went through the 5 Heian katas and Tekki Shodan - which is fine, because at every level we are to improve the kata that we no longer have to worry about for testing sake... but I'm pretty sick of some of those kata from doing them 5,000 times each.

Jutte and Hangetsu are both kata that don't have jumps in them, which is a good thing to me because I have bad arches in my feet and jumping isn't the best thing for me on cold hard floors like most competitions have. I got a chance to see how close I come back to my mark in Jutte but we didn't go all the way through Hangetsu before class ended, so I don't know how close to my mark I am there.

After class, two of the regular training females descended on me in the changeroom and said they had a "proposition" for me. I responded something smart ass about not easily being propositioned by women initially ;) They asked me if I'd like to be in a team kata with them this year for the competition season leading up to Nationals in May '06. Excellent! Last year I didn't get into a solid team for this, and this year we're able to choose from a much larger variety of kata, so this is good from all angles!

This weekend there's a 3-day seminar, the three of us should get a chance to walk through some kata to figure out what we like and what works for us together, and I'll get a chance to chat with my Enbu partner for this upcoming competition season, Scott. This is another event I'm very much looking forward to getting into, the pre-choreographed attack and defense sequences.

For karate reasons, I'm glad fall is here. I'll be sad to see the snow fly in October and November, however.

Jill